Asymmetry - Lisa Halliday Page 0,21
ID BLOCKED.
CALLER ID BLOCKED.
Beep.
He hung up.
• • •
At her door again:
Shave and a haircut, two bits.
Sighing, Alice picked up her keys and her phone and followed the old woman shuffling eagerly down the hall. The vacuum cleaner stood agape in a large dining room with floor-to-ceiling curios and a fireplace whose delicate molding had not yet been smothered over by their landlord’s indiscriminate brush. Behind them stretched a shadowy maze of yet more rooms, one after another all the way to the street, and in the air hung a stale, savory smell—half a century’s worth of latkes and sauerkraut, Alice guessed. On the mantelpiece lay a rent slip gritting its teeth for $728.69.
“Have you changed your clocks yet, Anna?”
“What?”
“Have you changed your—”
CALLER ID BLOCKED.
The words flashed like a heartbeat resuscitated in her hand. “I’ll be right back, Anna, okay?”
He sounded woozy, as if he’d recently woken up from a long nap, and in the background she could hear an aria diminuendoing. “What are you doing, Mary-Alice?”
“I was just helping the old lady on my floor replace the bag in her vacuum cleaner.”
“How old?”
“Old. Older than you. And her apartment is bigger than both of ours combined.”
“Maybe you should be fucking her.”
“Maybe I am.”
Back down the hall Anna was trying to wedge the vacuum’s bag out of its recess with a carving fork. “I’ll do it,” offered Alice.
“What?”
“I said I’ll do it for you.”
“Oh, thank you dear. My granddaughter gave it to me. I don’t know what for.”
“Have you changed your clocks yet?” Alice asked, standing.
“What?”
“I said did you remember to change your clocks back this morning?”
Anna’s eyes watered. “My clocks?”
“Daylight Saving Time,” Alice said loudly.
• • •
Culled from the mail:
A Symphony Space flyer on which he’d circled the Kurosawa films he thought she should see, specifically Rashomon and, if she were able to stay for the double bill, Sanjuro.
A Film Forum postcard on which he’d circled the Charlie Chaplin films he thought she would enjoy: The Great Dictator, City Lights, and Modern Times.
A MoMA Film brochure featuring a photograph of an actress drinking from a coupe glass in Rosenstrasse and whose hairstyle he suggested she try, should she ever decide to cut hers short.
His back was bothering him again, so she went to the Film Forum alone.
“When he twists the lady’s nipples with his wrenches!”—and she ran around the room, tightening the air with invisible wrenches. “And when he salts his prison food with cocaine!”—and she bugged her eyes and put up her dukes. “And when he roller-skates in the department store! . . . And when he runs down the up escalator! . . . And when he gets drunk on the shot-up barrel of rum!” Flinging out her arms, so that an imaginary pair of shirt cuffs flew off, Alice did a sort of slow-motion moonwalk around him in his reading chair, and sang:
Se bella giu satore
Je notre so cafore
Je notre si cavore
Je la tu la ti la twaaaaah!
“Señora?”
“Pilasina!”
“Voulez-vous?”
“Le taximeter!”
“Eat your tart.”
“Tu la tu la tu la waaaaaaaah!”
“Oh, Mary-Alice,” he laughed, wiping an eye and reeling her in to kiss her fingers. “My darling, funny, cuckoo Mary-Alice! I’m afraid you’re going to be very lonely in life.”
NOW THAT HIS BOOK was done, a number of deferred medical matters could be addressed, including a colonoscopy, a prostate screening, and some tests a pulmonologist had recommended to investigate a recent shortness of breath. He didn’t have cancer, and a steroid inhaler did away with the wheezing inside an afternoon, but it was also decided, at the urging of a new orthopedic surgeon, that his spinal stenosis be treated with a laminectomy. The surgery was scheduled for late March and a rotation of private nurses arranged to be on hand for two weeks, which stretched into three. One Saturday, shortly after he’d started another novel and gotten back on his feet, he and Alice and Gabriela, the day nurse, went out for a walk.
“Four pages,” he announced.
“Already?” said Alice. “Wow.”
Ezra shrugged. “I don’t know if it’s any good.”
They sat down to rest on a stoop on Eighty-Fourth Street and watched as a man with a toddler leashed to his wrist paused to frown at his phone.
“You want children, Samantha?” asked Gabriela, who was Romanian.
“I don’t know. One day maybe. Not now.”
“That’s okay. You have time.”
Alice nodded.
“How old are you?”
“Twenty-seven.”
“Oh, I didn’t know. You look sixteen.”
“She gets that a lot,” said Ezra.
“Anyway, you still have time.”
“Thanks.”
“. . . It’s when you are thirty-five, thirty-six, you need to worry.”
“Mm-hmm.”
“So when do you want